The quilts of Gee's, at PB

bars and string-pieced columns, originally uploaded by girlhula.

Not Since Oprah decided to add Faulkner to her book club authors has anything been so notoriously ridiculous. The above quilt is from the collection of the rural Alabama artists of Gee's Bend. Their lovingly handsewn and handquilted blankets are one of a kind and completely exquisite, both as bedding and as works of abstract art. They'll be auctioned off soon (sad, actually, that they'll be leaving their original homes for likely vapid white walls or worse, archival boxes for storage). This could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pockets of the daughters, grandaughters, and great-grandaughters of slaves and sharecroppers who used the most modest pieces of fabric imagineable: shed clothing worn until threadbare, grain sacks and rags... making them, ohhhhh, perfect. This is what I truly heart about the wealthy: enslave a people, then a few generations later, buy trinkets like a tourist for quarters on the penny.